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U.S. Won’t Release Land in Conservation Program

WASHINGTON — Amid improving harvest expectations for this year, the United States agriculture secretary, Ed Schafer, said Tuesday that he would not lift penalties for farmers who plant crops on land set aside for conservation.

Bakers and livestock owners had mounted an intense lobbying effort to erase the penalties in order to increase the harvest and lower high crop prices. The pressure intensified in June after floods washed away farm fields in the Midwest, leading to fears of a poor harvest.

But Mr. Schafer said recent forecasts indicated a larger crop than had seemed likely in the days and weeks after the flooding. In addition, he said that corn prices had plummeted 25 percent from record highs earlier this year, while soybean prices were down 14 percent.

“We don’t feel that the corn and soybean crops will be as bad as we originally feared,” he said.

The ruling was a major victory for conservationists and hunting groups, who had argued that lifting the penalties would have gutted the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers not to cultivate marginal land. Currently, 34.7 million acres are enrolled in the program, much of it in the Great Plains.

Under the terms of the program, farmers sign contracts for up to a decade or more. Farmers who terminate the contract must reimburse the government, with interest and a 25 percent penalty on the total rent payments they received.

“The Conservation Reserve Program is the holy grail of conservation, and we are pleased that the U.S.D.A. will maintain the program and the benefits that it has had,” said Barton James, director of agriculture conservation policy for Ducks Unlimited, an advocacy group.

But Robb MacKie, president and chief executive of the American Bakers Association, said that maintaining the penalty would hurt business owners and consumers who are struggling to pay higher prices for commodities and food.

“It is outrageous that the government is going to pay these folks not to grow when they want to grow on these acres,” he said.

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The National Pork Producers said the decision would hurt hog farmers who are struggling to pay for feed. Since the start of the year, farmers have lost $20 a hog on average because of soaring feed costs, the group calculates.

“We are cutting back our swine herd and production by as much as 10 percent over the next several months, and even then we will need more acres and more corn in 2009 to meet the demands of ethanol producers and other users to feed this smaller herd,” Bryan Black, the group’s president, said in a statement.

In May, responding to demands by livestock producers, Mr. Schafer had announced the unprecedented step of allowing more than half of the acres enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program to be used for hay and grazing, after the bird-nesting season was completed.

But in explaining Tuesday why he would not go further and lift penalties to allow farmers to plant on conservation land, the secretary explained that economic forces were already shrinking the program. In the last 19 months, farmers have paid their way out of the program to allow 288,726 acres back into production.